Monday, February 26, 2018

Gating item on acceptance of chatbots as a service

The gating item is that people don't believe a "robotic" language assistant can be anything more than a parlor trick. So I guess I have it to do: to explain why it is true language understanding and not a parlour trick.
But on the other hand, since you can always use structured language, you want to remind people that ZorkZero used language based UI thirty years ago. So: not to worry.

Thursday, February 22, 2018

With chatbots the message can itself be interactive

That is the point. There is no room in an instant message for an application's menu-ing system. But a chatbot occupies 0 screen real estate, yet is a gateway to anything you want - menu, link, or answer. So the chatbot becomes the application UI in an instant message.

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Chatbot architecture built on solid foundations

In case anyone is interested in my bragging, I want to claim that my chatbot architecture is getting pretty advanced - with things like built in context capabilities, sentiment, and multi-line handling. So consider:
Chatbots depend on Narwhal
Narwhal depends on the ProtoSemantics [link above and to the right]
ProtoSemantics depends on BestModels [link above also]

And it is all just another type of logarithm.

The ideal chatbot does not need to be human, just logical

There comes a time when the chatbot [I mean one created for a narrow business purpose] begins to seem realistic. But it can be logical as opposed to human. What I mean it, it may have an answer in every situation it is presented with (eg my current chatbot says "hmm?" when confused). Such things are mathematical possibilities.

Like a chatbot that could respond to greetings or be confused - alternating between "Hi" and "Hun?"

Friday, February 16, 2018

An alternative to slanted political campaign trolling

How about make it illegal to comment electronically about an election without first declaring a bias? That way, if you are unwilling to admit your bias then you cannot comment publicly. Instead you can go comment on web sites that share your bias implicitly and explicitly do declare their bias.. Cuz let's be face it: no one leaving a comment is politically neutral.

That leaves nothing except web sites a voter can visit or personal contacts a campaign can make with a voter.

Monday, February 5, 2018

Adding Service to a Group Messaging Platform

I have seen the light here and am confident that group messaging enhanced with knowledgeable chatbots is the way to go to deliver services, parts, and materials, and case tracking, in the dental industry. Of course my colleagues don't read this blog.
It is a good thing no one reads this blog. The idea of delivering services via a group messaging app is compelling. Do it medicine. Do it everywhere else that communication between people is part of the consumption of goods. Wait till insurers get into it. Image that the web page becomes a thing of the past.
UPDATE: More generally one observes that wherever people are interacting with data they want application level interaction - not just copy and view but also modify. Currently the messaging platform is like the early internet, when web pages were static and, only slowly, through advances in HTML and the Java, did web pages become able to act like applications. Well one can assume the same trajectory for messaging. It's data content (not the exchanged text) is static. But soon application level interactions will become possible. I am pretty sure the software mechanism for adding a menu-less application to a message, it so have it respond to messaged commands. So that is a chatbot. To repeat: chatbots play to role of Java in enabling applications within messaging.

Saturday, February 3, 2018

The puzzle of German word order

In English: "I saw the girl"
In German: "I have the girl seen"

Since I propose the "moving topic" as a substitute for grammar-n-syntax, the matter if word order being different in German and in English becomes another kind of puzzle. Let's stipulate that, regardless of one's preferred language, the ultimate narrative structure [after the sentence is complete] is 'I-saw->girl' and it is not clear if there is any basic difference between the languages as far as the basic meaning of the phrase. But there is the difference in word order.

I propose that the sentence, in either language, is designed for maximum drama. So in English the drama is the fact that it is a girl. In German the drama is that the speaker is taking action.

If one explores the moving topic, it shows how a German mind would be organized differently from an English mind. For me in English, the "I saw" has integrity missing from "I have the girl". Can I assume that a German has the reverse feeling of integrity? Since I eat lunch with a German woman and other people who constantly argue about language, we'll do the experiment.